SHARE WHAT YOU LOVE ♡ A Decision Tree for Choosing Free-Culture Compatible Open Content Licenses for Cultural & Technological Work

Since we all live under the current terms of each of our respective nation’s copyright laws, simply making something available or accessible over the Internet doesn’t make it free under copyright for others to use and improve upon. That’s why open content licenses exist: to abrogate the restrictions imposed by copyright law, and it’s why we need to use them.

Open content licenses are a means by which creative people can share their work with others: to adopt, adapt, and redistribute their work, even commercially, while retaining their copyright and requiring correct attribution. Each of these licenses is tailored to sharing particular media (software code, hardware specs, fonts, writing/music/art) according to a variety of intentions (e.g., remixability with works under other licenses, requirements for derivative works, etc.). This decision tree is an attempt to help creative people choose the open content or open source license suitable to them.

“SHARE WHAT YOU LOVE ♡ A Decision Tree for Choosing Free-Culture Compatible Open Content Licenses for Sharing Cultural & Technological Work” is shared with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes . He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.